Getting Lost in Dungeons

Dungeons are great, they are a non arbitrary limitation on what players in a TTRPG can do. It’s a confined space that by limiting freedom facilitates meaningful actions. Players in a dungeon are experiencing play at the most immediate scale with the least amount of abstraction. A dungeon is a defined understandable space at a level that a 6 or 12 mile wilderness hex cannot be.

Often what can be is more exciting than knowing the truth and the transition between the known and unknown state is exploration. As players work their way through a dungeon they are narrowing down limitless possibilities to a single understood reality. When you open the door and the area that could contain a manticore becomes the area that either does or does not. But the player’s understanding of the space, partially as a disconnect of trying to visualize a 3d space from descriptions, is not perfect. The manticore could always be invisible.

There are two senses of being lost. The first and simplest one, is where the player generally knows where they are but not how to proceed to their goal. They could be at a fork in the dungeon and not know what lies ahead, but they also have a firm understanding of how to go back the way they came. In most cases this is an easily resolvable scenario.

Being lost in the second sense is an incongruity between a player’s understanding of and the reality of their location. The PC could be in a maze or have passed through many hallways and forgot the choices they made at each intersection, or their understanding of the space they are in could be flawed somehow. The player does not have a clear understanding of how to go back the way they came.

The problem with becoming lost in a dungeon is a disconnect between the player and their character. While their character may have forgotten which way they came or somehow have become disorientated, the player is often sitting looking at a top down map of the area. The path is clear and apparent.

When the volcano erupts or the mine collapses it is trivial for the player’s to say their characters rush to the entrance. There may be obstacles but the path to take is generally apparent. Asking players to recite every turn feels tedious and highlights the disconnect from actually being in the space.

So how best to handle this?

Feeling Lost Matters in Exploration

Failure in exploration means getting lost. As long as exploration is a goal then the threat and feeling of becoming lost is a valuable key to facilitating the player’s immersion in the dungeon. Becoming, or the threat of becoming, lost puts pressure on the party’s resources: food, health, time. Without these other factors getting lost just requires brute forcing the dungeon, eventually they will find their way. Becoming lost is not the end, but it is a point of rapidly escalating tension.

Exploration without risk is just going through a checklist. There can be interesting options on the checklist, but in that case even a dungeon with multiple options becomes much closer to a linear dungeon with a single path through.

Ultimately I want the players to really feel they are discovering something, not just following a flowchart even if there is agency in which door they open first. How much sense of exploration, of endless possibility is left on a checklist?

When I talk about wanting players to feel lost, I’m not saying every dungeon needs to be a sprawling, confusing maze. I want to capture that emotional moment of disorientation—the “I don’t even know where I am anymore” feeling that comes with exploring something truly unknown. It’s not about overwhelming the players with endless complexity but about creating moments where the dungeon feels vast, mysterious, and alive.

Minecraft: A Case Study in Getting Lost

I think Minecraft is a good example of how much a perspective change can really make in increasing the possibility of the player actually getting lost and disoriented. The game is a first person perspective and players can explore winding similar looking caves and after a while it becomes very easy to miss where you came from when trying to back track or make a wrong turn and end up somewhere unfamiliar.

The caverns are truly three dimensional spaces and oftentimes you can drop down into an open space from the ceiling and completely miss that hole when coming back. Moving through winding spaces and verticality disorientates the player’s sense of direction and the lack of clear landmarks and similar looking caverns makes it hard to orient yourself or even realize the incongruence with where you think you are and the reality of your location.

You are deep underground, resources are running low, and you are surrounded by darkness.

The perspective is subject to the factors that contribute to a character in the dungeon becoming lost that a player looking down at a map won’t experience.

Lost Without the Labyrinth

If the player’s becoming or feeling the possibility of getting lost it seems natural to make dungeons as confusing and labyrinthian as possible. This can certainly be done but I think it has the potential to spiral out of control quickly. From being a manageable understandable space to something that is too complex to really understand and tedious to navigate.

I think that it is telling that in the 90s first person SSI dungeon crawlers like Eye of the Beholder, that contained nothing but labyrinths that could serve no functional purpose and contained traps that secretly spun the player around or teleported them to another area in the dungeon, essentially requiring the player to make their own map, were followed up by later games and sequels that added an auto mapping feature.

As much as this style of dungeon may be at the root of the hobby and still have its place, I think it does suffer the most from the disconnection in trying to understand a 3d space from descriptions.

Dark Souls: The Illusion of Disorientation

The best example I can think of preserving the sense of discovery and the fear of getting lost is in the first Dark Souls Undead Burg and Parish area.

While there are ancillary paths and some connecting other areas the main path when looked at from the top is a linear u turn, but utilizing spiraling levels and verticality does an excellent job of convincing the player that they are pushing deeper and deeper into the unknown. For many players, up until the point they take the elevator from the Undead Church down and experience the rush of surprise and relief when the familiar Firelink Shrine music fades in.

There are some diversions along the way but they tend to be very short, or spiral back to the main path or are only accessible later in the game. Compared with a later area in the game the Depths, which features a labyrinthian layout of intersecting hallways and hidden drops, the initial Undead Burg and Parish area is a completely linear path but still preserves the sense of discovery by disorientating the player so that they don’t feel they are just going down a checklist of rooms.

Proposals for Creating Disorientation

Of course the biggest tools that Minecraft and Dark Souls utilize are reliant on the perspective and method of interaction in their medium. A twisting staircase just won’t disorient a player with an omnipresent top down view of the map.

How can we bring this feeling to TTRPGs while keeping in mind the inherent problems of visualizing a complex 3d space from a verbal description.

Obscure the Map

The first step is not to give the players a top down map of the entire dungeon and focus more on verbal descriptions. While care needs to be taken to make sure the description is well done and You aren’t forgetting to mention there was another door in the corner or subjecting the players to tricks that entirely rely on the players incomplete understanding of the space, I don’t think it’s possible for the players to experience this as long as they are looking at a complete map.

Dynamic Layouts

The most obvious way to create incongruity between a player’s understanding of the space and the reality is to physically change it. This could be natural like rocks collapsing in a tunnel or fantastical like an enemy casting an illusion of a wall after the PCs pass by or some sort of mechanisation rotating a room or blocking a path.

The potential pitfall of this is that it can come off as arbitrary if there is no justification. A tunnel collapse during a volcano eruption would make more sense than a random untelegrahed one. A room rotating will feel plausible if the players have previously seen large gears and drive shafts.

Sensory Overload

An environment where everything is very similar or the senses are otherwise obstructed can telegraph to the players there is a danger of getting lost and explain that if they are turned around at some point they may not know which way they came from.

This could play out if the PCs are in tunnels filled with fog and combat breaks out. They may realize they have become disorientated or the GM could have them moving in a direction that is not the one they think they are moving in.

Environmental Landmarks

Players and their characters will use distinct elements of the environment to orient themselves. These could be duplicated, intentionally or not. If the PCs are wandering through a castle they may not realize that the room they just entered with the lion fountain is not the same one they passed by earlier.

These are also always subject to changes of a dynamic environmental change as well. If earthquakes are common, fallen debris may be common and the players may not realize the rocks they just passed by are the debris of the statue they passed on the way in.

Checks

When the PCs get to a location with the potential for becoming lost you can secretly make a check, this could be based on one of the PCs ability scores or just a low percentage. If the PCs fail, make a note and later if they try to auto pilot back out of the dungeon they go the wrong way and don’t realize until they end up somewhere that makes it obvious there is an incongruence in the understanding of their location.

Maybe the way out of the dungeon was all in stone structured hallways and they suddenly walk into an open cavern, or the path they are following ends at a dead end and at that point they are aware of the issue.

If you are creating the dungeon you can facilitate this by creating specific points for these checks along with similar diverging paths so the point where the PCs got off track is not immediately apparent. Sort of an anti sign post.

Virtual Tabletop

Virtual tabletops are increasingly common, either for online play or as an in person tool. These could facilitate disorientation without relying on over complex dungeons. Many will have some type of fog of war tool, where the map can be obscured when out of the field of the PCs vision.

If there was an option to keep the PCs perspective stuck one direction and rotate the map instead, the GM could certainly make use of Dark Souls style spirals and verticality. Combining that with proximity-based communication would go a long way in fostering an immersive sense of exploration and discovery.

Player Engagement

In general, in a dungeon, players in a resource management dungeon crawl will want to play optimally for the most part. As such player’s will not want to become lost and will try to take measures to prevent becoming lost which, to preserve agency, should not be arbitrarily defeated.

The GM should avoid making players feel punished for clever planning. Losing their way should feel like a natural consequence of the environment, not an arbitrary decision.

Mapping

As was likely more common when complex dungeon crawls were the de facto style of play, a player can use the GMs description to make their own map of the dungeon. My guess is the players doing this are certainly taking the risk of becoming lost seriously and are definitely engaging with the game so I wouldn’t suggest this is something the GM should try to work around.

If the player gets useful, accurate descriptions and maps the dungeon accurately, they probably won’t become lost.

The main caveat is that making a map should be a diegetic action, meaning that the player who is making the map’s character is also making a map and as the map exists in the world, it could be lost or destroyed. This could certainly be abused, but if the PCs fall down a waterfall it seems reasonable they could lose their map. Maybe they can recreate what they had from memory but the one the player has been working on is gone if the one the player’s character is carrying is gone.

This is also where certain dungeon architecture could be used to confuse players map making, by for instance having a long corridor with a nearly imperceptible slope changing the players elevation without them knowing. How likely someone would construct a space that implemented this type of subterfuge is up to anyone’s guess, but it certainly was a common enough dungeon feature that abilities to detect it, like Dwarves noticing slight slopes or new construction, made its way into the Players’ Handbook.

Marking

Possibly in addition to mapping, players’ may try marking their path as they progress through the dungeon. Generally the effectiveness of this method depends on what they are using. Painting a giant red arrow might be hard to miss, but if they are just making notches in an already scraped up wall, its tough to say whether an hour later they can find it.

This is always subject to dynamic environments that might affect it, or something eating the bread crumbs they left on the ground to mark their trail. In general the more time and willingness to risk someone else finding their mark, or hearing them make it, will make it harder to miss, but for other, possibly, hostile parties as well.

Conclusion

Getting lost, whether in a video game or a TTRPG is about more than the geography. It’s about the emotional weight of uncertainty and the satisfaction and relief of finding your way again. With this in mind when we design and run dungeons we can use this as another tool to increase immersion and not just going down a checklist of rooms.